What Children Contribute to Language-Learning

Abstract

There may be no greater testament to the resilience of language in humans than the observation that, when deprived of a language entirely, children will invent one nonetheless. Deaf children whose access to usable conventional linguistic input, signed or spoken, is severely limited develop gesture systems to communicate with the hearing individuals around them. The children's gestures resemble natural language in that they are structured at both sentence and word levels. Although the inclination to use gesture to communicate may be traceable to the fact that the deaf children's hearing parents (like all speakers) gesture as they talk, the deaf children themselves appear to be responsible for introducing language-like structure into their gestures. In particular, the structural properties found in the deaf children's gesture systems cannot be traced to the gestures that their hearing parents use with them, nor can they be traced to the way in which the parents respond to the children's gestures.